General Description

Family crests and shields were the most impressive way to increase the status of an item in 18th-century America. Not only did it promise uniqueness, but quite blatantly hinted at an association with English nobility and gentry. By the time of the American Revolution, they appeared on a wide variety of high-end consumer goods, from silver tankards and fine porcelain like this, to carriages and servants' livery, to the decorative relief over doors and on ceilings.

Heather Bowling, Digital Collections Content Coordinator, 2017

Drawn from

Stephanie Grauman Wolf, "Rarer than Riches" in The Portrait in Eighteenth Century America, (Newark: University of Delaware Press), 1993, 97.